Public Domain Images: Trädet och flodkröken III (Bois-le-Roi), oil on canvas painting (1877) by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911), currently located at Nationalmuseum Stockholm (National Museum of Fine Arts, the national gallery of Sweden).
Public Domain Image: Seine-Landschaft mit Pappeln (1877), oil on canvas painting by Swedish painter Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911), 74 cm x 108 cm, located at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
Public Domain Photo: Seine-Landschaft bei Bois-Le-Roi (variously titled in English as ‘Seine Landscape in Bois-Le-Roi’, ‘The Tree and the River Bend’, ‘Motive from Bois-le-Roi on the River Seine’, etc.), oil on canvas painting (1877) , 53 cm x 72 cm, by the Swedish painter Carl Fredrik Hill, currently in Göteborgs konstmuseum (Gothenburg Museum of Art) in Sweden.
Having born and spent the early years of his life in Lund, Sweden, Carl Fredrik Hill (1849-1911) started his career as a landscape painter. After studying at the Stockholm Academy of Fine Arts, Hill moved to France, and went to Barbizon in the south of Paris in 1874. Barbizon was home to several artists and most of the budding artists of his time converged there.
Hill had had little success as an artist, because his works were not accepted at the Paris Salons. Eventually at the age of 28, he was hospitalized with a severe psychotic attack, ending his career as a landscape painter. With the help of his friends, he went home where he was hospitalized. After a short period in the St. Lars mental hospital in Lund, he was mostly restrained to his home in the care of his sister and mother until his death in 1911.
The period of 28 years before his death is considered his ‘second great period’ as art writers would later describe. It was a new phase of his career that saw him creating thousands of drawings applying various techniques and using watercolor, India ink, pencil, ink, crayon, etc. His inspiration for these works was his memories of various scenes that influenced him, his vivid imagination and art illustrations found on books and other publications.
Hill’s life as an artist started with the vehement opposition from his father who was a mathematics professor who did not want him to become an artist. It was followed by various rejections of his works by the Paris Salons, and possibly such depressive treatment he got must have lead to his suffering from the psychotic attack which was later diagnosed as hallucinations and paranoia. After being released from the hospital, he continued to work only to find an outlet for his creative quest, and to defend himself from the staring failure of his life as an artist. And Carl Fredrik Hill was never given the recognition as an artist during his lifetime.
Several of his work were neglected and lost, but some 3500 drawings are estimated to exist. Out of these, over 2000 drawings and 23 of his oil paintings are in the Malmö Art Museum. Most of these works were donated to the museum by Hill's heirs.
After Carl Fredrik Hill’s death his drawings were located mainly by artists, who admired his work and style. In 1949 an exhibition of his works was held in Geneva, Hamburg, London, Basel, Luzern, and in Paris in 1952. These exhibitions triggered of a series of books on Hill’s works. Now Hill is recognized as one of the best of Sweden's landscape painters, and his works inspire artists internationally. A recognition that eluded Hill during his lifetime!
Art critics and historians have opined that Hill anticipated many of the modern art movements and his works even influenced great artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and many others.
Public Domain Image: Ostern am Walchensee (translated English title: Easter at Walchensee), oil on canvas landscape painting (1922) by the German painter Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), dimensions 57 cm x 75 cm, located currently at Sammlung Berend-Corinth, New York.
Public Domain Photo: Multnomah Falls, a waterfall on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge, located east of Troutdale, between Corbett and Dodson, along the Historic Columbia River Highway - the third tallest year-round waterfall in the United States.
PD Photo 2: Multnomah Falls, Oregon, USA, before the footbridge was built, photo dated 1914 (or before), colorized from black-and-white photo
PD Photo 3: Multnomah Falls, Oregon, with footbridge and showing the upper falls and the lower falls, looking 100 degrees east, photo taken in June 1994
PD Photo 4: Multnomah Falls, Oregon, a view from the base showing the lower falls and part of the upper falls in April 2006
PD Photo 5: Multnomah Falls, Oregon, showing the base, the lower falls, footbridge, and part of the upper falls
Multnomah Falls, the tallest waterfall in the State of Oregon, drops in two major stages, upper falls of 542 feet (165 meters) and a lower falls of 69 feet (21 meters), with a 9 feet (3 m) drop in the elevation between the two. The total height is conventionally stated as 620 feet (189 meters).
Photo: Sydney Harbour, view from the air, showing the Opera House, Sydney Central Business District (CBD), Darling Harbour, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Parramatta River, North Sydney and Kirribilli in the foreground, photo taken by Rodney Haywood during a helicopter joy flight.
License for reuse: THIS IS NOT A PUBLIC DOMAIN PHOTO, but the copyright holder, Rodney Haywood, allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other uses are permitted.
Attribution: Sydney Harbour Aerial View, photo by Rodney Haywood
PD Image: The cave of Orpheus' oracle in Antissa, Lesbos, Greece
Orpheus has a special importance in Greek mythology, with the inspiration for Orphic cults, literature, poetry and drama of ancient Greece and Rome and Western classical music.
According to one myth, in the later part of his life, Orpheus disdained the worship of all gods except the sun, whom he called Apollo. One day he went to the oracle of Dionysus at Mount Pangaion to salute the sun at dawn, but was rent to pieces by Thracian Maenads for not honoring his previous patron (Dionysus) and buried him in Pieria.
Ovid’s account of his death gives it a bizarre twist: the Ciconian women, Dionysus' followers, killed him, when they were spurned by Orpheus, who had hated women after the death of his wife Eurydice, who died of a snake bite, after which he had taken only boys as his lovers. First the women threw sticks and stones at him, but his music was so powerful and beautiful that even the stones and sticks refused to hit him. However, finally, the enraged women tore him to pieces. In an Albrecht Dürer drawing a ribbon high in a tree is lettered ‘Orfeus der erst puseran’ (‘Orpheus, the first sodomite’); an interpretation of the passage in Ovid where Orpheus is said to have been ‘the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys.’
His severed head and lyre, still singing mournful songs, floated down the Hebrus River (Maritsa or Evros) to the Mediterranean Sea, and the winds and waves carried them on to the shores of Lesbos island (now in Greece), where the inhabitants buried his head and a shrine was built for him near Antissa. There his oracle prophesied, until it was silenced by Apollo.
Lesbos, the Greek island located in the northeastern Aegean Sea, is the third largest Greek island and the largest of the numerous Greek islands scattered in the Aegean, and separated from Turkey by the narrow Mytilini Strait.
Interestingly, one meaning of the word lesbian is derived from the poems of Sappho, who was born in Lesbos and who wrote with emotional content towards other women. It is due to this that Lesbos and especially the town of Eresos, Sappho’s birthplace, are a hot destination for lesbian tourists/ LGBT tourism. But, the deeply conservative Greek Orthodox population of the island disapproves of it strongly. In 2008 the Lesbian islanders lost a court battle against the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece. The Lesbian islanders had requested a legal injunction to bar homosexual groups from using the word ‘lesbian’ in their names, because the petitioners’ claim it violates their human rights as it is ‘insulting’, and the usage of the word ‘lesbian’ to refer to certain sexual preferences of women disgraces the people of Lesbos island.
PD Photo: Stivan Beach on Island Cres, Croatia, is located south of Lake Vrana at an altitude of 100-120 meters, photo by Thomas Musich.
